Handling Equality in Logic Programming via Basic Folding

We introduce a new approach to handling equality in logic programs. The method is based on the transformation of equational logic programs into logic programs without equality using basic superposition and the basic folding. We prove soundness, completeness and the existence of terminating strategies. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated on examples. An implementation is briefly discussed. 2 2 Copyright c fl 1995,1997 Anatoli Degtyarev, Yuri Koval' and Andrei Voronkov. This technical report and other technical reports in this series can be obtained at http://www.csd.uu.se/~thomas/reports.html or at ftp.csd.uu.se in the directory pub/papers/reports. Some reports can be updated, check one of these addresses for the latest version. 1 Section 1. Introduction Section 1 Introduction This paper further develops an approach to logic programming with equality introduced in [14]. By a logic program with equality we understand a Horn clause logic program in which equality may occur b..